any update on scrypt guild. sorry if seeming impatient. just want to have a use for my radeon HD 5450 ( thats supposed to have BFI_INT, but apparently doesnt)

woohoo for 20Khash

None yet. Ran into a few fun problems in the last 24 hours when starting to do some actual testing of the server against bfgminer & cgminer. Packet-level junk was interfering with their ability to parse the JSON >_<. Got that fixed, and now I'm just moving through the code in the same process a miner interacts with the server.

Very close to having the SHA256 side done now. All that's left is the actual pushing of shares to bitcoind/namecoind when a block is solved, logging the shares to the DB (already tested the function just haven't plugged it in), and then memory cleanup when clients disconnect.

Unfortunately, it looks like Scrypt Guild will probably not be ready until sometime next week. While I'll probably have a working pool server, I won't have any kind of database/web frontend ready for it to plug into so people can setup accounts, monitor stats, and actually get paid.

any update on scrypt guild. sorry if seeming impatient. just want to have a use for my radeon HD 5450 ( thats supposed to have BFI_INT, but apparently doesnt)

woohoo for 20Khash

None yet. Ran into a few fun problems in the last 24 hours when starting to do some actual testing of the server against bfgminer & cgminer. Packet-level junk was interfering with their ability to parse the JSON >_<. Got that fixed, and now I'm just moving through the code in the same process a miner interacts with the server.

Very close to having the SHA256 side done now. All that's left is the actual pushing of shares to bitcoind/namecoind when a block is solved, logging the shares to the DB (already tested the function just haven't plugged it in), and then memory cleanup when clients disconnect.

Unfortunately, it looks like Scrypt Guild will probably not be ready until sometime next week. While I'll probably have a working pool server, I won't have any kind of database/web frontend ready for it to plug into so people can setup accounts, monitor stats, and actually get paid.

fair enough. i think i just got the widest array of mining hardware ive ever seen up and running want a list? all on 3 BBB

Or the operator can take %1 of all our hashing power and put it into his own account? He would make a lot more money. Right now with all the users that are here, I can guess that a pool operator with these fees probably brings in $80-$100k/year. If he took 1GH/sec from all his miners, he'd make a whole lot more money and we'd pay less fees, right?

Or the operator can take %1 of all our hashing power and put it into his own account? He would make a lot more money. Right now with all the users that are here, I can guess that a pool operator with these fees probably brings in $80-$100k/year. If he took 1GH/sec from all his miners, he'd make a whole lot more money and we'd pay less fees, right?

There's no difference between giving a pool operator 1% of your hashrate or paying a 1% fee.

Users restarting their miners or new users first connecting might experience intermittent connection drops over the next few hours. They're spaced far enough apart for any average miner to get a share in easily and get redirected to the appropriate backends, at which point they're safe from the drop.

The new Stratum code is getting its first deployment on the botnet/ddos validation frontend (stratum.btcguild.com). Since this server is only actually used by users for a few seconds (time to get one share submission), it's the safest place to give this new code a live test against the onslaught of botnet miners always trying to access the pool.

Sorry if anybody here is affected by it, but like I stated above, this server shouldn't actually affect anybody unless they just happened to restart their miners as the server was being swapped between the old and new server processes.

Could someone let me know if these stats are okay or is there something out of whack? I'm just not sure what the normal rates are.

Total shares 2032928 (99.70)Stale 6048Dupe 672

99.7% acceptance rate is pretty good. My general target for users is 99.5% or better before there may be a problem (and in some cases that problem is just the firmware/hardware they're using and the reject rate will follow them on any pool).

Well, it took a few hours of debugging little issues, but the US validation server is now running the new Stratum code, and hasn't crashed in the last 10 minutes. Not much better you can do in terms of stress testing than putting it up against the server that is constantly being spammed by botnets.

This is going to be left up for the next few hours, then I'll swap it back to the old one when I head to sleep for the night (just to be safe). Tomorrow's work will be focused on adding in the few pieces that are needed to put this up for the real backend servers. The new server is showing fairly significant performance increases thanks to the much improved threading model.

If anybody is having problems starting up their miners, let me know! I've tested it myself with my little USB Block Erupter, but there's a lot of software/hardware variants out there.

Not much better you can do in terms of stress testing than putting it up against the server that is constantly being spammed by botnets.

Just out of curiosity, how do you filter out the botnet connections? On second thought, this is probably something you don't want to disclose publicly. And it's just an intellectual curiosity on my part. I run a forum (unrelated to Bitcoin) and botnet countermeasures (to combat forum spam) have become something of a sport for me, so I'm always eager to hear how other people have solved similar problems.

I pledge never to use this space for sleazy referrals, gambling spam, or to beg for handouts.

Not much better you can do in terms of stress testing than putting it up against the server that is constantly being spammed by botnets.

Just out of curiosity, how do you filter out the botnet connections? On second thought, this is probably something you don't want to disclose publicly. And it's just an intellectual curiosity on my part. I run a forum (unrelated to Bitcoin) and botnet countermeasures (to combat forum spam) have become something of a sport for me, so I'm always eager to hear how other people have solved similar problems.

The problem with botnets is that outright banning them turns their zombie PCs into a non-stop DDoS as they spam reconnects with the mining software. Blocking them upstream isn't exactly viable given how many of them there are. Not many places will let you setup a deny list with hundreds of thousands of individual IPs, with constant updates required.

The validation server acts as a tarpit, keeping the botnets stuck while letting good miners through. It's not perfect, and it has ended up making some legitimate mining software not work (GUIMiner). But the good has outweighed the cost. The few botnets that get through I'm able to identify after the fact, add them to a block list, and then the next time their zombies connect to the validation server they're stuck there instead of getting passed through like good traffic.

Sadly that doesn't quite work for things like spambots.

UPDATE: Validation server is back to the old code for the night. There's a few tweaks to be made for tomorrow. Probably won't be going live on the backends tomorrow just because I don't want to have it running for only a few hours before I get some sleep tomorrow night. Would prefer to launch it first thing in the morning Monday so I can watch it the entire day.

I cant get on btcguild website:(Errorcode: sec_error_ocsp_unknown_cert)

Website errors like the ones posted above are on Cloudflare's end, not BTC Guild's. Unfortunately, I can't do anything about them. The benefits gained from using Cloudflare outweigh the cost of the occasional certificate error message. Luckily they are (normally) region based, rather than affecting all users at once.